It might have been a signature of the Stranger that he always destroyed his victims’ eyes by stabbing or gouging, but he wasn’t alone in that, Gemma reminded herself. Okay, it wasn’t a common feature of serial sex murders, but occasionally the eyes had it – so to speak. And yet considering this was such a momentous thing to do, quite often those responsible would offer only garbled explanations as to why.
One had professed an ancient, long-discredited belief that an image of the last thing the victim saw before death would be imprinted on the internal optical structures, allowing identification of the murderer on the pathologist’s slab – though no one had taken it that seriously, given this was the educated twenty-first century. Another had described it as a convoluted act of remorse, saying he’d sought to remove all sense that his victims were human beings. ‘As the eyes go, so goes the soul,’ he’d whined in a voice that almost pleaded for his interrogators’ sympathy. ‘It’s easier to tear and mutilate a doll than a living person.’ A third had adopted the polar opposite viewpoint, coldly claiming his victims’ eyes as trophies, and keeping them in jars on the shelves in the ‘workshop’ located in his cellar. The idea they were somehow sentient had excited him. In his eventual confession, he’d admitted: ‘I was aroused by the thought they were being protractedly tortured, trapped indefinitely in sealed glass containers, unable to vocalise their suffering, unable even to blink away the sight of me, their captor, in my endless triumph.’
Gemma hadn’t memorised any of these details, but then she didn’t need to. Even before Heck had hung up, she’d accessed Serial Crimes Unit Advisory, or SCUA for short – the unit’s own intelligence databank, and now called up one case file after another on the screen in her office. Purely on principle, she would never have let Heck know she was doing this. He’d always been a chancer; he took risks and gambles, but so often they paid off because his instincts were very well-honed. She’d benefited from them hugely, but that didn’t mean she could openly approve of this approach, even indirectly, by attaching undue credibility to it. But it was unfortunate, or maybe fortunate depending on your view, that Heck hadn’t mentioned anything about the assailant up in the Lake District going for his victims’ eyes – if he had, that would have been a smoking gun no one could ignore. In the original Stranger investigation, the aspect of the eyes being attacked had been of crucial importance.
Gemma opened the files in question, for the first time in quite a few years. Immediately, all kinds of memories flooded back. The crime scene photographs ensured that, along with the hundreds of statements taken, the intelligence and analysis reports and the many, many names involved – not just the other officers on the case, but the victims and their families, and the numerous suspects who’d slowly, steadily and very frustratingly been ticked off the list as their alibis checked out. She imagined she could smell again the rankness of the reservoir that stifling hot night, could hear the wind whispering through the thick, dry grass on the Dartmoor ridges, could feel the heat rising from the sun-beaten landscape. But more than anything else, she could clearly visualise that bestial, leather-clad face with its frothing, gammy-toothed mouth. Despite the many awful things she’d seen since then, the small hairs at the nape of Gemma’s neck stiffened at the mere memory.
It didn’t affect her quite the way it used to. She didn’t dream about the Stranger anymore – at the end of the day he had given her a soaring career, so she could hardly complain. But like so many other cases for which no real and satisfactory solution had been provided, the subject came up in conversation with discomforting regularity. There’d never been anything to suggest the killer was still alive, but perhaps deep down it wouldn’t have surprised her if something did. Very little about that enquiry had actually been straightforward. The guy had murdered indiscriminately, yet at times had behaved more like a professional assassin than a sex case, never leaving a trace of physical evidence, covering his tracks with amazing skill. And yet all the way through he’d behaved as if he was on a kind of learning curve, constantly modifying and adjusting his methods – so much so that in the initial stages of the investigation, before Gemma was actually attached, West Country police forces hadn’t immediately been sure they were dealing with a serial killer. Had it not been for the brutal stabbing of all the victims’ eyes after death, which rapidly became the Stranger’s trademark, they might have set up separate enquiries.
With her usual painstaking thoroughness, she now ran back through the primary crime reports.
The first known Stranger attack had involved the death of a lone householder, an elderly man living in a remote cottage on the edge of Exmoor in north Devon. He had died in the armchair in front of his fireplace on a cold February night in 2003, as the result of a flurry of blows to head and body, probably delivered with a stone taken from the wall outside, and several vicious stab-wounds to his neck and chest, one made with a spike-like object that was removed from the scene by the killer, the others caused by the victim’s own household implements – a carving knife and a wood chisel, both of which were left standing in his gaping wounds.
Though there was no sexual interference with this victim and nothing of value had been stolen from the scene, the initial assumption was that a burglar was responsible – that he’d simply not been able to find anything he wanted, and that the post-mortem stabbing out of the old man’s eyes had been a ghoulish act of vindictive anger.
The second attack had occurred on a quiet country lane in Somerset, the following July. It was late at night, and two teenage girls had been hitchhiking home from the Glastonbury Festival. Someone had stopped a car alongside them, but with no intention of offering a lift. This hadn’t been an out-and-out sex attack either, but it was closer to that than the first. One of the two victims, the heavier built of the two, who also, coincidentally, had worn her hair cut very short – which conceivably, in the dark, had led the attacker to mistake her for a male – had been felled with a single skull-crushing blow from behind, delivered with a heavy stone. The other victim had then been dragged into a roadside ditch and forcibly divested of her jeans, though not her underwear, before being subjected to a severe beating, at the end of which she was ripped and slashed with several edged implements. Once again, both girls’ eyes were gouged post-mortem with some kind of steel spike, which forensics examiners concluded was a sharpened screwdriver. If there was any lingering uncertainty they were dealing with the same killer as before, that disappeared when the old man’s DNA was discovered in both female victims’ eye-sockets, implying the same screwdriver had been used in both attacks.
These initial three slayings constituted what investigators would later come to refer to as ‘the first string of murders’, primarily because they hadn’t yet fully adopted the Stranger’s trademark MO.
The ‘second string’ would commence within a few months. These would be more organised and less opportunistic in nature, and as they’d focus primarily on courting couples and doggers, would comprise the crimes for which the Stranger would best be remembered. He was clearly learning fast by this stage, because in these cases all the new victims were stalked beforehand, covertly and professionally. But he was also enjoying himself more – possibly because the females in these cases were ‘dressed for sex’, and because the very isolated locations in which he found them allowed him to take his time. Whatever the reason, the methods used to eliminate these latter victims were increasingly more gruesome, a wider variety of implements used, the females in particular suffering ever greater and more prolonged savagery.
Gemma perused the raw detail with her usual unemotional eye, though even for someone who had been physically present at several of the crime scenes, the final few photographs made harrowing viewing, while the accompanying medical reports were sufficient to put the most experienced homicide investigator off her lunch. Of course, in all this mass of information there were only three obvious connectors to the case Heck had just reported from the Lakes. As he’d said, the unsuccessful assault on the two walkers was vaguely similar to the successful assault on the two hitchhikers near Glastonbury. But that could be coincidental. Likewise the second possible connector, which was the blitz assault with the heavy stone; again, the use of such a crude weapon would not be atypical of the average opportunist offender. But the third connector was more difficult to dismiss.
Strangers in the Night.
The press had only come to dub the killer ‘the Stranger’ when the second string of murders was well underway and he’d settled on his targets of choice: sexual adventurers looking to hook up with strangers. But as far as Gemma was aware, that was the only reason they’d given him such a moniker. By pure chance, the song Strangers in the Night had happened to be on the radio during his final attack – the one in which she had been the intended victim – but the investigation team had never publicised this fact. The only other non-police person who could have known about it was the Stranger himself.
On its own, this fact perhaps wasn’t quite enough to chill the blood, but then Gemma would have been lying to herself if she didn’t admit she hadn’t spent at least some part of the last ten years wondering where the Stranger’s body lay.
Or if indeed it lay anywhere at all.
She ruminated on this for several minutes, before standing up, straightening her skirt and leaving her office. The main detectives’ office, or DO, as it was known, was located at the far end of the department’s main corridor and filled with chattering keyboards and idle discussion. As usual, about half the team were on base, and one of these was big, bearded Detective Sergeant Eric Fisher. SCU was not a cold-case unit, but Gemma always believed in keeping half an eye on the past, and it fell within DS Fisher’s remit, along with his many other analytical roles, to regularly review all their open and unsolved cases, particularly in response to new and possibly relevant info flowing in from more current enquiries.
‘Eric, what are you doing?’ Gemma asked.
He glanced up from the nest of paperwork over which he’d been slumped.
‘Homework, ma’am.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I’m at Winchester Crown tomorrow. Regina v Smallwood.’
‘If you’re giving evidence tomorrow, I’d have hoped you’d be on top of it by now.’
‘So would I.’
‘Yeah, well drop it for the time being.’
Fisher sat back, his swivel chair creaking beneath his vast girth. ‘Ma’am, I …’
‘This won’t take a minute.’ Gemma leaned with folded arms against the filing cabinets alongside him. ‘Strangers in the Night …?’
‘Okay … nice song.’
‘That’s all it means to you?’
‘Well …’ He adjusted his glasses as he pondered this. ‘Believe it was originally part of a movie score. Frank Sinatra released it sometime in the mid-60s …’
‘No comedians today, Eric, please.’
‘Sorry, ma’am.’ He pawed the spillage of paperwork on his desk. ‘Always get nervous when I’m going to Crown. Just trying to lighten the load. Erm …’ He squinted as if it would help him recollect. ‘The Stranger referred to it as his tune, or something like that … on the night you shot him.’
Gemma pursed her lips. ‘Who else knew about that, Eric?’
‘Aside from a select few in the Stranger taskforce, and SCU, no one.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘That intel’s accessible via SCUA and HOLMES 2, but only if you know what you’re looking for beforehand. If I remember rightly, a strategic decision was taken back in 2004 to withhold that specific detail from the public.’
‘That’s correct,’ she said. ‘And no one has reversed that decision at any time since?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
‘Okay, Eric … thanks for that.’ She moved to a big grimy window overlooking Victoria. It was shortly before noon, but the dull, damp greyness of late November pervaded the city. Many shop-fronts were lit, vehicles shunting along Broadway in a river of headlights.
‘Something wrong, ma’am?’ Fisher asked.
‘No, it’s okay.’
She didn’t elaborate, so he shrugged, spun around at his desk and recommenced his homework.
‘But I’m going to be away for a couple of days,’ she added as an afterthought.
He spun back again. ‘Anywhere nice?’
‘Normally, yeah. But at this time of year I’m not so sure. Cumbria.’
He arched a bushy, red-grey eyebrow. ‘You’re not by any chance seeing …?’
‘Don’t ask me that, Eric … okay? Just don’t!’
Immediately, she regretted her curtness. Two and a half months ago, Eric Fisher had only been one of several SCU detectives to express dismay that Heck, in his opinion the most proficient investigator in their team, was transferring north. In fact, despite Gemma having so adversarial a rep inside the National Crime Group that she was quietly referred to as ‘the Lioness’, the normally affable DS Fisher had been so forthright in his view that she’d ‘catastrophically mishandled’ her latest disagreement with Heck that she’d almost suspended him. She’d only resisted that ultimate sanction because she’d known where such impertinence stemmed from – a genuine conviction they were making a big error letting Heck leave.
‘Maybe,’ she admitted. ‘Possibly. Yes alright, probably.’
Fisher nodded, quietly pleased. ‘Cool.’
‘There’s nothing cool about it, trust me,’ she said. ‘I’d much rather stay here.’
‘You going up there alone?’
‘For the moment.’
He seemed puzzled. ‘So … what’s the case?’
‘There isn’t a case just yet. Not for us.’ Understandably, he looked none the wiser. ‘It’s a ghost if you must know, Eric.’ Sensing several others earwigging from different corners of the DO, she lowered her voice. ‘Can you believe that? I’m chasing a bloody ghost.’